We know all the region servers are now running in Amazon Web Services aka THE CLOUD. A number of backend services were moved before the region servers. The uplifting of all the services needed to run Second Life™ and render it was announced January 5, 2021, in a featured article: 2021 Update: Life in the Cloud. They were announcing the completion of the move to the cloud.
The idea of SL being completely moved to the cloud depends on who is speaking and what they are thinking of as the Second Life SYSTEM and what they mean by ‘moved’. On a general and practical level, Second Life is in the cloud. In Strawberry’s article of January 22, we are told the Destination Guide is in the cloud and running too.
I am not keeping up with SL tech like I used to. I play more these days. But, today I made it to a Server-Scripting meeting. BIG changes.
UPLIFT
The Lindens tell us the UPLIFT is the biggest change to the service ever made in the history of Second Life™. Expect problems and odd glitches. They even posted a request in the SL Tools & Tech section of the SL Forum, A Light in the Cloud. Patience. As they move to eliminate the one foot in data center and one in the cloud, things are likely to get bumpy. Expect odd problems. Lots of people are working hard to make this change as smooth as possible. The optimistic completion is before the holidays.
The UPLIFT of region simulators to the cloud is in high gear. You can tell if the region you are in is running in the cloud in Help->About… Look for the “You are at…” part. You have to know how to read server names and URI values to tell. But, simply said cloud addresses are amazon.com and Linden Data Center servers have the address linden.com. This simple distinction will go away as more regions move to the cloud. The Lindens will use what they call a synthetic name, which gives the Lindens more useful information about the server and its regions.
Knowing which region is located where is not going to matter for long. Soon it will all be cloud based. Then only the Lindens will need to know which server is carrying which region.
We are told that last Tuesday night at minimum use time about 1,000 regions were Uplifted to the cloud. Mazidox Linden tells us those regions have been running with only minor problems.
They anticipate moving may be 2,500 regions Wednesday (10/28) to the cloud. Which means problems are very minor. This will also mean more than half of all regions will be in the cloud.
Today we got our first set of server Release Notes for the cloud versions. See an example: Release Notes.
Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:
That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.
I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.
Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.
There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.
